09 Jan 2009 12:34 pm
Carolyn Haggis, of Oxford, England, writes, "I'm looking for a word for the items of clothing which sit perched on a chair in my bedroom, waiting to be reworn. They are not yet ready for the laundry bin (since I plan to rewear them), but they are no longer suitable for the wardrobe (which I reserve for clean clothes). I assume others keep their lightly worn clothes in a similar purgatory?"
Post a comment if you have an idea for the word that Carolyn Haggis needs. If you hope to be quoted in The Atlantic and earn indisputable bragging rights, please sign in with your full name, and include in your post the town and state (or country) where you live.
09 Jan 2009 11:44 am
My fellow Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a couple of days ago about "conversate": is it a word or not? He interviewed Jesse Sheidlower, of the Oxford English Dictionary, and they had
a good conversation, well worth reading. Jesse is a smart guy and a first-rate lexicographer. But one thing no lexicographer is likely to tell you is that we don't need dictionaries anymore to tell us what counts as a word. We can decide for ourselves.
As Jesse said, what lexicographers do is search out words that people use, see how they use them, and write them up. Adding a new word to the dictionary doesn't amount to giving it a stamp of approval; it just means that the lexicographers found the word in wide enough use over a long enough time that they decided dictionary users might want to know about it.
Well, owing to the Internet, anyone today can figure out how widely used a given word is. Just google it. "Conversate" is all over the Web. If, however, you want to find out whether it's in standard use -- which is often what people mean when they wonder if something is a "word" -- archives of edited media, such as Google News, are a better place to look. According to a search I did just now, "conversate" has turned up in the newspapers and press releases, etc., that Google News tracks exactly five times in the past month. That's very few. Two of the five come from Ta-Nehisi himself; two are from AllHipHop.com, and one was published in an actual newspaper, in a quote from a basketball player. Isn't this already starting to be a good basis for drawing your own conclusions about "conversate"?
07 Jan 2009 02:40 pm
Huh. I have as many peeves as the next grammarian, but "slay" doesn't particularly bother me. It's no farther off-kilter than "pix" in the beloved 1935 Variety headline "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" (translation: Small-town and rural viewers aren't responding positively to movies set in rural milieux).
Headlines are often highly condensed -- I've put in my time as a newspaper editor deleting unnecessary syllables to get the danged thing to fit on one line. And "Slaying" is at risk of being read as a participle rather than a noun-adjective -- as in "Slaying Suspect Amanda Knox, Mystery Killer Vanishes."
In any case, I probably don't need to worry that "slay suspect" will turn up in The Atlantic anytime soon.
04 Jan 2009 06:24 pm
I have no opinion -- none at all -- about whether Caroline Kennedy would make a good senator. But for someone with a law degree and now political aspirations, she's
astonishingly ill-spoken.
It's not necessarily admirable in consumers of political rhetoric like me that we focus more readily on "um"s and "you know"s than on what the person is saying. But we do, and it's no surprise that we do -- English teachers and speech coaches have been making this point forever.
I never whaled on Sarah Palin for the way she talks, because there isn't much reason to suppose she could do better. She doesn't have a fancy education, and she doesn't come from a place that's world-renowned for its intellectual life. But Kennedy is a different story. She has the best education money can buy and every possible reason to know what accomplished public speaking sounds like. And she still sounds like a dope, because of those "um"s and "you know"s.
29 Dec 2008 12:15 pm
Am I paranoid to wonder whether AT&T's "customer-service" representative was punishing
Stanley Fish for correcting her grammar? Or, more precisely, for ranting?
He kind of asked for it. I mean, she was instructed to say "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" He complained. No doubt she has also been instructed to say "I'm sorry you feel that way" in response to any complaint she can't resolve. So when that remark elicited another complaint from Fish, there wasn't much she could do to get him off the phone (and surely she has also been instructed to get callers off the phone ASAP) except to fob him off on someone else. So she invented a problem with his Social Security number and shipped him off to limbo.
Real human communication has been driven far underground in our dealings with corporate representatives. Paradoxically, corporate goals of courtesy and efficiency are what drove it there. Of course, the result is neither courteous nor efficient -- it's just mechanized. The only partial solution I know is to stay really, really nice, even when I'm really, really annoyed. Does anyone else have another strategy that's more satisfying?
21 Dec 2008 01:59 pm
NPR's "On the Media" had a fascinating
interview this weekend with Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and language consultant, about President George W. Bush's linguistic ineptitude. Luntz doesn't focus on dopey malapropisms like "put food on your family" but on how clumsy Bush has been at framing issues.
For instance, Bush has talked about a "bailout," though it would sound a lot more reassuring if he'd call it a "recovery plan" or "rescue plan." Some of his other locutions -- such as calling prisoners of war "enemy combatants" -- have the opposite problem: They're such flagrant attempts at spin that they invite our cynicism.
All in all, it's refreshing to hear a Republican talk frankly about something Bush has gotten wrong and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama get right.
18 Dec 2008 04:59 pm
I am happy to report that
Gawker has sworn off "douchebag" as a term of abuse. (Commenters take note.) If it's over according to Gawker, it's way more than over according to me!
18 Dec 2008 03:01 pm
... the following commenters on my
November Word Fugitive post, which requested a word for those thoughtless folks
who stop dead at the top of an escalator or walk four abreast on a busy sidewalk.
Geoff Webb
Cathy McNally
Amy M.
Hank Horsey
Space and time permitting, I'd
like to credit you for your coinages in the March Atlantic. You'll each be more unmistakably you if you'll let me
know by e-mail what town and state you live in - and Amy, in your case, your
last name too.
11 Dec 2008 11:34 am
There's never room in the magazine for all the amusing Word Fugitives suggestions people send me. Well, hooray for the Internet, where I can post other responses that made my cut. The request to which readers responded in the December issue was this:
Eileen Flug, of Westport, Conn., writes, "I'm looking for a word for the seemingly universal, irresistible impulse, when faced with a dishwasher that someone else has loaded, to rearrange the dishes."
After the jump, some respondents and responses I especially liked. If you sent me the same coinage as one of these people, apologies that you're not credited by name. I went with either the first person to make a given suggestion or the one I thought explained it best.
Continue reading "That "irresistible impulse"" »
06 Dec 2008 04:24 pm
Michael Muslin, of Chicago,
writes, "After my girlfriend observed that train commuters with wheeled
briefcases navigate their rolling offices without regard to anyone
else, I realized I needed a word to describe an object which indicates the user
to be a jerk. Cell phones used to be this type of object but, due to their
ubiquity, are no longer."
What might be the word that Michael needs?
